This past Friday, Judge Richard Andrews of the District Court of Delaware held a hearing on InterDigital’s motions to dismiss several FRAND-related counterclaims in three district court cases InterDigital brought against Huawei, ZTE, and Nokia over 4G-essential patents. For a brief refresher on the issues raised in InterDigital’s motions to dismiss — which have been pending for months — you can check out our prior posts:

After the July 12 oral argument, the court issued a written order memorializing its decision. The court granted InterDigital’s motion in part, choosing to dismiss some of the defendants’ FRAND-related counterclaims (although granting leave to amend and re-plead some of the claims).

Note that the court’s decision on the waiver of right to enjoin/seek injunctive relief is more consistent with the ITC’s recent Samsung-Apple decision than the decisions in the Microsoft-Motorola or Realtek-LSI cases, although it’s generally found that “waiver” is not by itself an affirmative claim. We will have to wait to see if and when the defendants decide to re-plead some of these counterclaims, or whether they’ll rely on FRAND-related affirmative defenses in the parallel ITC case.

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David W. Long founded Essential Patent LLC (http://essentialpatent.net) to focus on patent law and related hi-tech intellectual property issues, including standard essential patents, licensing negotiations, mediation and other legal services. David has over twenty-five years of telecommunications experience, including over twenty years litigating complex patent cases in federal district and appellate courts. Read More

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The Essential Patent LLC intellectual property law firm welcomes you to the Essential Patent Blog! This blog was started in response to increased interest and litigation surrounding standard-essential patents (SEPs). Historically, most SEP issues were relegated to theoretical discussions in academic literature or conference presentations. But that’s changing.